The study of nonlinear systems and dynamics has emerged internationally as a major area of interdisciplinary research over the last three decades. In India there are a number of groups actively involved in research in this area. Need was being felt for a forum where active researchers in this area can meet periodically - to report new experimental and theoretical developments, to examine hypotheses to explain physical phenomena, and to discuss common problems faced by people working in this field. Consequently, organization of National Conference on Nonlinear Systems and Dynamics (NCNSD) on an essentially annual basis was conceived. The first such meeting was held at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur (NCNSD-2003) and the second one was held at Aligarh Muslim University, Aligarh (NCNSD­2005). The present one is third of the series and it is being held at Ramanujan Institute for Advanced Study in Mathematics, University of Madras during Feb. 6-8, 2006. This book contains the proceedings of this meeting.

As in the case of the earlier meetings, the primary objective of the conference was to put together experts and active research workers in the country with varied background from Universities and Institutes working in Nonlinear Science and Dynamics and discuss the recent developments in the subject. There were 60 accepted papers (including two review articles) and more than 100 registered participants.

Solitons, integrability, classical and quantum chaos, bifurcations, turbulence, spatio­temporal-pattern formation, networks, etc are some of the key concepts which have emerged during the past four to five decades in the domain of research in nonlinear science. Major developments have taken place in these topics and this meeting discusses some of them. The contributed original papers which are appearing in this proceedings have all been peer reviewed.
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As in the previous NCNSD meetings, in the present meeting also we have organized an 'Interactive Session', besides the standard Poster session, where opportunity is given to demonstrate/cross examine experimental (including computational) results. We have made it a point to allocate papers to the interactive session not based on any judgment on the quality of the paper but solely based on the recommendation of the reviewer regarding the desirability of a demonstration and cross-examination of the work by fellow participants in an interactive mode.

In the Oral sessions, in contrast to the international conference standard of 15-20 minutes, we decided to allow a full of 30 minutes for each presentation as in the previous NCNSDs. This, however, forced us to go for parallel sessions-which might make some participants miss some lectures of interest. However, there are other positive aspects in such a program and so we continued the practice.

In order to maintain the quality of the presented works, we took some measure to ensure that all papers published in the Proceedings go through a well coordinated peer-review process, and more importantly they are presented personally by one of the authors at the conference. We have made some changes in the division of the papers into the subject categories at the time of the production of the Proceedings, because in some cases the authors wanted to move their papers from one subject class to another, and in some cases we felt it proper to change the initial allotment of papers depending on their actual content.

The editorial work of the entire set of articles submitted to the proceedings was handled meticulously by a Board of Editors consisting of G. Ambika, Rama Govindarajan, Neelima Gupte, Krishna Kumar, M.Lakshmanan, K.Murali and R. Sahadevan. A systematic and efficient procedure to handle the papers electronically was developed by Soumitro Banerjee and his coworkers from Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, which was fully utilized during the editorial process. We are much indebted to all of them.

The conference could not have been successful without the shouldering of responsibility by the members of the Local Organizing Committee consisting of V.Balakrishnan, Radha Balkrishnan, M.Lakshmanan, A.Lakshminarayan, K.Murali, Neelima Gupte, K.P.N.Murthy; Sudeshna Sinha, S.Parvathi (Director and Head, RIASM) and other members of Ramanujan Institute for Advanced Study in Mathematics. Their contribution is gratefully acknowledged.

Sincere thanks are also due to University of Madras, Centre for Nonlinear Dynamics, Bharathidasan University, Tiruchirapalli, The Institute for Mathematical Sciences, Chennai, Indian Institute of Technology, Chennai, Tamilnadu Higher Education Council who provided the necessary financial support without which the organization of the conference at such a small registration fee would have been impossible. Last, but not the least, we thank the members of the National Organizing Committee who have enriched the conference by offering timely and constructive suggestions and advice. We are grateful to Allied Publishers Pvt. Ltd., Chennai for bringing out this book in a short notice.